On Premise? On Demand? Does it have to be one or the other? Some firms combine both...
Novozymes, a company that is at the forefront of the biofuels revolution, is combining the best of the on demand and on premise worlds. “We have a broad range of Microsoft technologies,” says Soren Egestad, senior department manager at Novozymes who heads up a global unit that is responsible for deploying CRM and business intelligence technology within the sales and marketing function.
“We are a world leader in industrial enzymes and sustainable biological solutions. Our enzymes are a major player in bio-fuels so we are a major contributor to a Greener world. We are a B2B company. We have a few very large customers that we deal with so CRM is critical to us. We have 5,000 employees and up to 800 of them are in customer-facing processes around the world.”
Dual deployment strategy
The firm ended up with its dual deployment strategy effictively by accident after acquiring a number of other firms. “We had been working with CRM for about 10 years and we had been very successful, with well established processes in place,” says Egestad.
“We changed because our systems were getting old and lacked ease of use. Our knowledge workers work with Office and they were always asking why they could get CRM into Outlook. At the time, I didn't know about Microsoft CRM. We also lacked integration to our back end SAP systems so we had telephone numbers and emails all over the place. It led to redefine how we look at CRM.
“Then, by coincidence, we ended up with two divisons where we needed to take different approaches. The enzyme business is our core business, but due to acquisition we have a BioBusiness division based on five or six bought-in businesses, one of which was using Salesforce.com. So we found ourselves with one division that had an on-premise solution and many processes in place, then we'd bridge over to one that needed something up and running really quickly for units that didn't know anything about CRM. So we went on-demand for the BioBusiness division.”
This dual appoach has delivered its own benefits. “We have seen examples of times when we can resuse functionality across divisions,” says Egestad. “We can take stuff and move it back and forth. Our on-demand projects have in fact acted as pilots for large on-premise ones. We may bring more stuff from the on-demand side over onto the on-premise side. The muli-tenancy ability also supports our acquisitions strategy. We can get new companies we acquire up onto an on-demand solution really quickly, then maybe bring them over to on-premise over time. It took us 48 days to get 100 users online with the on-demand solution.”
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